Chef dishes on new book
In a career spanning more than 70 years, Jacques Pépin has partied with the likes of James Beard and Julia Child. He was the personal chef for legendary French statesman Charles de Gaulle and turned down an offer to cook for the Kennedy’s. He founded the French Culinary Institute, which has produced some of the most popular chefs of the last 50 years.
But what does one of the most famous chefs in the world like to eat at his home in Madison?
“Chocolate milk. Mixed with Rice Krispies,” Pépin told a soldout crowd at the Sacred Heart Community Theater in Fairfield last month. “For my granddaughter at home.”
He said he learned the the trick from a chef friend’s wife when he first came to the U.S. He’d join the family in breakfasts of Oreo cookies and mini boxes of Rice Krispies. He brought the tradition to his family.
“I still love it,” he said of the snack.
Pépin, 87, was the guest of honor for a live taping of actor and fellow Connecticut resident Chris Sarandon’s podcast “Cooking by Heart.” Sarandon, famous for roles in “Dog Day Afternoon,” “Child’s Play” and “The Princess Bride,” launched the podcast last year to discuss “memories of the meals or favorite foods we all grew up with” and “discuss the stories and people that accompany those memories.”
Both men grew up around food. Sarandon’s family, hailing from Greece, operated a diner in West Virginia. Pépin’s family had a series of restaurants in France after World War II.
“There definitely was an unspoken context of a shared early life,” Sarandon told Hearst Media. “I specifically asked him about the passage in his memoir where he described the menu at one of his mother’s first restaurants.”
Much of the conversation centered around Pépin’s latest book “Art of the Chicken.” The book was released in September and Pépin was the guest of honor at Greenwich Wine + Food’s 10th anniversary celebrity chef gala shortly after. The new book veers from the more than 30 cookbooks penned by Pépin in that it’s based on stories and art rather than focused on recipes.
“I did not want to do a cookbook,” Pépin told Sarandon. “I wanted to do a book of my drawings and paintings of chickens.”
But like chickens, the idea didn’t fly. So, he compromised.
“I said, ‘Fine.’ I’ll tell you a story about chickens,” Pépin added. “So it’s not a cookbook.”
The book — and Saturday’s conversation — takes one through Pépin’s story and journey with food. From humble beginnings eating preserved eggs and using beets for sweetener in a warravaged France while his father fought Nazi’s with the French Resistance, to starting an apprenticeship at a local restaurant when he was 13.
During the show, Pépin talked about working the stove as an apprentice for about a year. He’d prop the door open with a spoon to control temperatures and move food to different sections of the oven for low and high heat. Not long after turning 14, he said, the chef wasn’t in and he was called down to run his first dinner service. As he watched nervously from the kitchen door, diners asked for the chef to compliment him. They were stunned to see a boy emerge from the back.
“It was my first touch with celebrity cooking,” he joked to the audience, emitting a round of laughter.
And it was far from his last. Pépin was among the first class of American celebrity chefs along the likes of Julia Child and James Beard — whose name still adorns one of the food world’s most prestigious awards. His friendship with Child led to an award-winning book and TV collaborations. He won 16 James Beard awards, and helped usher in the chain restaurant era as the director of research and development for Howard Johnson’s when the nowdefunct franchise had more restaurants than McDonald’s and KFC and boasted it fed more than any institution but the U.S. Army.
He turned down an invitation to be then-President John F. Kennedy’s personal chef for the job with
Howard Johnson. That first brush with success, Pépin told Hearst, also set the tone for his career — it was all accidentally on purpose.
“I could’ve been a cook or a cabinet maker,” he said. “Then, cook was at the bottom of the social scale.”
Celebrity cooking wasn’t the plan. One job, just led to another, he said. Running service at 14 led to studying in Paris. His cooking skills were even noticed during a stint in the French Navy that got him a post cooking for three French heads of state. Before heading to America, he was the personal chef of French President Charles de Gaulle, who led Free France during the German occupation in WWII.
In New York, he worked everywhere and every day. He joined a guild that sent him to cover whatever position needed filling at whichever restaurant needed it. And he didn’t write recipes. He cooked by feel. A chicken breast a little thicker or thinner than the other meant seasonings and cook time could be adjusted. It wasn’t until consistency across a chain like Howard Johnson’s became important that Pépin started tracking recipes.
Pépin said as he’s gotten older, the cooking has simplified. When he was young, he said life was about adding as much to the plate as he could. Now, it’s about simplicity — a tomato with some olive oil and coarse salt from his garden or a bowl of cereal with his granddaughter, now a college student in Boston. These days, he said it’s more about the discussion and community that comes with the experience of cooking than the food itself.
“I’ve eaten some of the greatest food in some of the greatest restaurants in the world,” Pépin said. “The food is never as important as who you’re eating it with.”
The live Jacques Pépin episode of Sarandon’s “Cooking by Heart” is available on his website, Spotify, Audible, Apple Podcasts and more.